Today I attended an IT event at my school where colleagues explained the EdTech journey the school has been on.   I am not long in the school hence have largely came in late in the day.   Within part of the presentation a colleague identified the pedagogical reasons behind the selection of the core apps to be used across the school, citing a number of areas which largely corresponded to the 4 Cs (Collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking) plus a few other points.

This got me thinking about creativity and how we might go about developing creativity in our students.

Makerspaces might be one opportunity to develop creativity in that this puts students in a position where they have various resources available to them to solve a problem or to create something.    Taken as a single event a makerspace session largely taps into a students inherent creativity rather than further developing what they have.   If they are not very creative then they will struggle.   That said, students generally have the potential for creativity especially in their younger years.    The opportunity to work in teams, collaboratively, may impact on creativity possibly as they gain access to new ideas through working together.   Also the repeated use of makerspaces may help in developing a students tendency towards being creative however I am not sure how it might help in making students “more” creative.

I wonder about the act of teaching creativity, or more accurately of teaching about how we think and therefore how ideas which may be considered to be “creative” might be hidden from us due to the way we think.      I have read De Bonos book on divergent thinking and I wonder about how some of the example activities contained within might be used with students.   I believe building an awareness of how we think and how we learn might help students in developing their ability to think creatively, and outside of the box.

We talk about developing creative students however can we put our finger on where we are doing this, how we are teaching or facilitating learning which develops creativity?